Hi!  My name is Juan Garzon for those of you who don’t know me or never heard if me, I’m the new guy here at MOUSE. My job is to support your MOUSE Squad and help you succeed.  My official title is Field Support Representative.  I go from  school to school to learn about what you do, offer my assistance by shareing the knowledge I have accumulated from all our schools.  When I stumble upon good things happening, which I always do, I share them here.  Today I want to share about my visit to Bard High School Early College. 

Like the name suggests these students jump in to college early in High School, and graduate with an Associates Degree. Although not a substitute for College it gives these students a head start. http://www.bard.edu/bhsec/

The MOUSE Squad at Bard is known as BHSEC Techs and their fearless leader is Peter Kolbe. Peter's management style is supportive.    The squad has no formal meeting time but everyday his students come in and out of his office looking for more to do. While I was there I saw at least 3 students come by and talk to Peter. In addition to providing tech support for the school, these students have their own personal projects such as Graphic Design, PHP programming and learning Drupal. Peter guides each of these kids on their projects and points them in the right direction to find the answers. He communicates with them via email, the school's intranet and of course, face to face. 

Peter has taught his students how to use Clonezilla to image and backup the schools computers which makes it possible to recover more quickly from a massive problem. Peter is a major supporter of open source software and along with Clonezilla, he teaches the students how to use Open Office, to replace Microsoft Office, and teaches FireFox as a more secure and customizeable internet browser.  He has documented some of the enhancements that can be done on his blog http://bolt.beetlebolt.com/blog/?p=96

As an added bonus we brought along the XO Laptop from OLPC project. http://laptop.org/laptop/ This laptop lit up the math department when we pulled it out and after a short demo we let Peter and his students borrow it so they can write about on his blog http://bolt.beetlebolt.com/blog/ They've shared their reflections http://mousesquad.org/node/3761. At the end of the day I learned a couple of new things myself, such as using Thunderbird as an effective alternative to Outlook. It’s great to see this new squad up and running.  Stay tuned for more profiles from the field.

Peter and Juan

Composing music on the B4 prototype

Trying to logon to the MESH network